When flat earthers and creationists find common ground

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on December 29, 2024.

It was hyped as “The Final Experiment.” Led by pastor Will Duffy of Agape Kingdom Fellowship in Wheat Ridge, Colo., a group of people who believed in a flat earth and others who believed in a global earth traveled to Union Glacier, Antarctica, together on Dec. 14 with the desire “to end the debate over the shape of the earth.”

According to flat earthers, the North Pole is at the center of their map, with Antarctica being an ice wall around the outside of the map that holds the ocean water in. Because the sun rises and sets toward the middle of the plain, it would have to rise and set in Antarctica as well. But according to globe earthers, there is a period of time where the sun doesn’t set in Antarctica.

Jeran Campanella, who runs the flat earth YouTube Channel Jeranism and attended the experiment, said ahead of time: “If it’s me down there, it is technically the final experiment as long as there’s not cloud cover the whole time.”

Lisbeth Acosta, another flat earther who attended, admitted: “If the sun stays up for a full 24 hours then it’s definitely something that I’m going to have to reconsider because as of right now, the current model that is given doesn’t account for that.”

Other flat earthers such as “Flat Earth Dave” Weiss and Eric Dubay were invited to an all-expenses-paid trip, given their influence and their claims over the years that a 24-hour sun in Antarctica would cause problems for the flat earth model. But according to Duffy, both men declined when given the opportunity.

With the transition happening in January toward the new Trump administration, we’re going to be living in a world that is extremely polarized about some of the most fundamental questions regarding science, truth and who to trust. Trump’s nomination of people like Dr. Oz to oversee Medicare and Medicaid as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services will ostracize us from one another even further.

And this isn’t even getting into concerns about climate change. Additionally, 2025 is the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial during which a high school science teacher in Tennessee was arrested, charged and found guilty of teaching evolution at school until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction. And we all know conservatives have plans to use the courts to reshape education.

So while The Final Experiment may be an entertaining story to consider, it also gives us a chance to name some challenges we’ll be facing throughout 2025.

Overcoming conspiracy theories in real time

One of the challenges Duffy faced, beyond simply the obstacles of organizing a trip of this magnitude, was the constant skepticism of the flat earth community.

“I was told that no flat earthers would go and we got two of the biggest flat earthers — Jeran and Austin — to join us,” Duffy said. “Once they agreed to go, I was told that anybody who’s a big name in flat earth is just a shill and they’re not real and you’d have to get somebody that nobody knows is a flat earther if you really want this to be the real deal. And then we got Lisbeth to joint us and not a lot of people knew about her.”

Another challenge was the possibility of weather. “I was also told that if we somehow did make it here that NASA would make fake clouds to cover the sky so that we couldn’t see the sun,” Duffy recalled. But thankfully, on the day of the experiment, the sky was almost perfectly blue.

But even that wasn’t enough. Duffy said, “Some people tried to say whatever we were going to do in December was already filmed somewhere else in the world and this will just be a recording.” So he brought the Starlink equipment necessary to broadcast live and then interacted with comments as they came in during the livestream.

Still, the flat earthers had more conspiracies. One person told Duffy, “They’ve manipulated the time zones in Antarctica to make people think that the sun is out at midnight when it really isn’t.” So they performed a live experiment at midnight for Ushuaia, Argentina time. And then they measured the location of the sun spots in order to make sure they were both looking at the same thing and that NASA hadn’t created an illusion in Antarctica in order to trick them.

The globe earthers also conducted at least 17 experiments, made predictions on what they would find, and confirmed their predictions with sun dials, cameras and cameras recording the cameras.

But even that wasn’t enough for some flat earthers in the comment section who claimed it was all CGI and they should pick up snow and throw it to prove they were actually there.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.